


Touch Starved

by spun_foonerisms



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Other, gender neutral reader
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-02-27 06:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13242786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spun_foonerisms/pseuds/spun_foonerisms
Summary: Peter doesn’t get touched enough, especially by you. he’s a little stressed about these feelings. This is set 4-5 years after Homecoming, with Peter as a sophomore in college. i avoided using specific pronouns for the reader character for maximum accessibility.There's gonna be some more chapters but I'm not sure how many so just take this. Love you!





	1. Some Texts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood for this chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz3uj2M2Nyg

Peter breathed out hard through his nose. You had been so close to him tonight. The smell of you was fresh in his mind. He inhaled with a hiss through his fingers. He could feel how hot his cheeks were through his palms, and he hunched over further. _So close_. You had been playing guitar, practicing some new song. He had felt you singing against him, back to back, head to head. He had felt you strumming, changing chords, heard you swear under your breath every time the melody stuttered under your fingers. He wished he’d been stuttering under your fingers. You had hugged him when you parted ways. It was all he could do not to beg you to stay in his arms. He tried to slow his breathing.

You’d been friends since last year. You shared a music theory class that Peter was taking to fill out credits and he (naïvely) thought the class would be a breeze. _Unfortunately_ , two years of middle school clarinet does not a keen theoretician make. _Fortunately_ , he’d met you. You were by no means breezing through the class either, but whatever it was that made you want to study music made you hardcore about it. You did homework with Peter until two in the morning nightly just to help him get it. He maintained that it was the only reason he still had a GPA above 2. It was certainly less than ideal, but C’s get degrees, right? Regardless, you were supposed to be friends. You _were_ friends. Friends who spent late, late nights together. Which was why Peter was sitting horrified (but not surprised) by the hunger in his chest.

If he approached it practically, sitting back-to-back with you had really been the best profit-risk option. On one hand, since he couldn't see you, he couldn’t get caught staring with his mouth open like a fucking _goober_. He hadn’t able to feel the effects of your heart-stopping smile, and you couldn’t have seen him blushing profusely while you sang. On the other hand, this kind of contact was excruciating. What he’d really wanted was to be lying across your lap. He wanted you to run your fingers through his hair and carry on quiet conversation about _who gives a shit_ as long as you were talking. He had felt every breath…

He sighed again and leaned back in his pathetic dorm bed, far enough to hit his head on the wall. He let his hands fall to his lap. He felt like an affection gremlin. Pay attention to him after midnight and he got gross and would probably burn something down if given the chance. It would be _fine_ if it were just sex fantasies. That would be him being a horny 20-year-old, which would be nothing out of the ordinary. Dumb hormones could be controlled for. Longing to _hold_ you, wrap himself around you like a stupid koala, feel the warmth of you against him, it… denoted a worrying attachment. Something that had not proven to be safe for Peter, on the whole.

It wasn’t like he had any reason to worry any more. Mostly. It was still only May, Mr. Stark, Ned, and M.J. who knew he was Spider-Man, and he didn’t have reason to tell anyone for now. Thanks to Mr. Stark he had a full ride at this school and a team of co-engineered robots (that he’d made Tony swear to the press were a Stark-only creation) to watch over his home city until he could return. If he wanted to. He had a way out of the spotlight, but… it had only been a year since he had stopped being a public figure. He hadn’t stopped being on full alert yet.

He knew full well this kind of mental rambling was a way out of facing his feelings. Peter Benjamin “King Dumbass” Parker was head over heels. He slumped down the wall and stretched. He hadn’t asked for it but Mr. Stark had paid for a single. He was grateful for the solitude in times like this. Peter sighed long and heavy. _Shit_. He reached a hand over to the mountain of pillows he kept at the head of his bed and pulled a longer one from the pile. He wrapped an arm around its pretend shoulders. If he tried he could imagine you talking to him, half asleep and incoherent. He kissed the pillow. Almost immediately Peter disentangled himself, sat back up and groaned. He patted the pillow in apology. Thank god nobody would ever know about this and that there was no possible way for anyone to see, or even perhaps read about, this event.

He pulled out his phone and checked for messages. He had done this kind of thing before, the whole crush thing, albeit before his career as Spider-Man. It dawned on him that that meant it’d been _at least_ six years since he tried to do “date stuff.” Which was probably the dumbest way he could have put it. He thanked The Powers That Be again for keeping these thoughts in the privacy of his own mind. No messages from you, so he put the phone back down.

There was a vast pit of longing that yawned in him. It had woken the first time you touched him and hadn’t shut up since. He always needed more time with you. More contact with you. There was never enough. Peter did not like to think of himself as someone irrational or unaware of consequence, but he knew he’d do just about anything to get you to touch him regardless of what befell him. And he did. He asked for massages, bumped into you, brushed his hand against yours, spread his knees just far enough to touch you, he’d even made the brazen move of stretching his legs across your lap one movie night. Some inscrutable force made it impossible not to reach for you. This couldn’t be defined the way he wanted.

He picked his phone up again. If it _was_ scrutable (or whatever the opposite of inscrutable was) he’d have undone it by now for his own sanity. Anyway. Mr. Stark would tell him to do something, probably, and Mr. Stark was paying for him to be here. With you. Technically, this meant Tony was paying for him to text you. Technically.

\---

Message sent to **Please Please Date Me** at 12:13 AM: You up? 

Message sent to  **Please Please Date Me**  at 12:16 AM: Because I'm up and if you wanna like. Go for a walk or something

Message sent to  **Please Please Date Me**  at 12:16 AM: Let me know.

Message sent to  **Please Please Date Me**  at 12:20 AM: Or whatever

\---

Peter was lucky you never cared to look through his phone. Not only would you see the name he’d given you, you’d see a looooot of texts gushing about every minimal gesture and asking friends how to act around you. He turned the text noise-y alert-y thing on and lay back down beside the pillow. “Do you think I have a chance?” he whispered. The pillow said nothing. Shit advice, as usual.


	2. Conspiracy Theories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone so much for your kind responses, I know I haven't updated in forever but your support really motivated me to make this chapter! I hope you enjoy <3  
> also, the traditional chapter song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79TiEN2nng  
> (and related viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79TiEN2nng )

Message from **Peter Bo Beter** at 12:13 AM: You up?

Message sent from **Peter Bo Beter** at 12:16 AM: Because I'm up and if you wanna like. Go for a walk or something

Message from **Peter Bo Beter** at 12:16 AM: Let me know.

Message from **Peter Bo Beter** at 12:20 AM: Or whatever

\---

You squinted at the texts. It was too late for this. Too early. “Or whatever,” as he said. Jesus Christ. What more was it going to take? You’d hoped he would’ve picked up on your intentions by now. For fuck’s sake, you’d sang him _love songs_! Not that he noticed, you think. Like serenading a potted plant, for all the response you received. You put your phone on Do Not Disturb and left it under your pillow. You didn’t want to deal with anything else Peter had to say just yet. You groaned and sat up, patting around the bed for your earbuds. Fuck.

The boy was a walking contradiction. He’d stay up all night with you but wouldn't look at you the whole time, say he loved your music but look away when you played, split for the night only to text you to hang out later, on and on ad nauseam. He had been keeping you in relationship limbo for nearly one and a half years at this point, and you were beginning to lose hope. Your mom had always told you mixed signals were a signal on their own, but you weren’t sure with him. You didn’t want to be sure. You didn’t like having to defend him to yourself, having to make a case for why you should keep trying. You loved him, obviously. You were well past denying that. He was a ray of sunshine and got your heart thumping harder than a seasoned metal drummer’s bass drum, but... Things shouldn’t have been this complicated, surely. You knew they shouldn’t.

You’d been hurt before. The last time you had been in a situation like this, the object of your affections had simply been basking in the flattery of your feelings. Peter didn’t seem the type, but then again, neither had the last person. _They never do_ , you reminded yourself. You found your earbuds and scrabbled with the jack for a few seconds before you were able to put them in. Your trust in your own perception had taken a strong blow after that uh... relationship? You weren’t sure what it counted as. You’d be damned though if you were going to sit around and mope about it. You weren’t about to let it happen again.

You took a long, sleep-heavy sigh. You had to take back control, even a little bit. This time you weren’t going to text right back. You fished your phone out from under your pillow and opened it to flick between the pages of apps. This time, you were going to settle down for an episode or two of some show or something and take your sweet, intentional time about it. You weren’t going to keep chasing him, and if he wanted to walk with you he would have to stay awake for your response. You could only hope your mom was wrong, for once.

A couple episodes of “some show or something” turned out to be a few minutes of scrolling through instagram and then a nearly hour-long deep dive into flat earth YouTube. Conspiracy theories were a hobby, though they stopped being fun around 1AM. You usually cut yourself off before you got too deep. Anyway. It was about time to meet Peter’s offer. You sent a few artificially bright texts (very intentionally not thinking much about it) took your phone off of Do Not Disturb (though it was always on vibrate anyway) and went to bed. If he took you up on it he took you up on it, but you decided you weren’t going to lose any more sleep over this game of cat and mouse.

Probably.


End file.
